What protections will be in place for eBay UK sellers with the latest snow?

We look forward to hearing how eBay UK sellers will be protected from defects and the like over the next few days after renewed snowy weather has disrupted parts of the UK.

It seems likely that there will be problems, specifically on Monday, when it comes to deliveries, and delays are almost inevitable. We’ll find out more over the next few days but we anticipate that eBay will extend protections along the same lines as they did before.

In order to prevent negative impact to seller accounts caused by the adverse weather, we’ll take the following measures for affected transactions from 27 February to 03 March by:

· Automatically removing Late Shipment Rate defects for a delivery delay of maximum 2 days
· Reviewing and removing Feedback and low Detailed Seller Ratings if sellers feel they’ve been unduly affected by the adverse weather and have supporting evidence.
· Monitoring Detailed Seller Ratings and taking corrective action in cases where there’s an abnormal increase in low Dispatch Time ratings across all impacted sellers.

– eBay UK announcement

This wave of snow seems to have predominantly affected the south and east of England but other areas have ben impacted too.

Although snow has fallen in several parts of the country over the weekend, we expect to make normal deliveries and collections of mail in all areas on Monday 19 March, where access is possible and it’s safe for our people to do so.– Royal Mail

What has your experience been over the snowy period in recent weeks and months? Have your deliveries and collections been adversely affected? And has eBay come through and protected you when there have been problems? What will Amazon be doing?

Ckaire

1 year ago

In answer to your question… Same as previously, niente, zilch, nothing…
🙄

SAM

1 year ago

” Have your deliveries and collections been adversely affected?” ohhh just a bit between 28th and 2nd Royal Mail were a complete disaster. Naturally all the issues were eBay customers. We are still waiting on a international tracked and signed to get to Gran Can sent on the 28th. Royal Mail took till the 9th to get the thing to Heathrow, they were a total shambles.

Defects were not automatically being removed, as normal we had to jump through all the hoops on eBay. Any other platform e.g GAME”no hoops” or silly defect systems to worry about.

Toby

1 year ago

After the last lot items sent out on the 5th of match were still being delivered between 14th and 15th! Absolute nightmare. The last we heard from ebay was that if we received defects we had to ring them and go through each item as well as supporting evidence, which RM have not been able to supply other than to point us towards site wide notices warning of the delays… but no reference to the length of time delayed.
Our postie told us that all delayed items were being fed slowly into the system to avoid delaying later posted items!
Ebay as usual were late on the advice, and took the root that meant alot of sellers simply wouldn’t bother with the hassle. I for one don’t have the time to sit at my desk in a queuing system to then spend ages listing all the details form late deliveries and explaining why i can’t prove they were due to snow other than we had no business collections for 2 days and then took over 10 days to arrive.
Would it have hurt ebay that much to suspence delivery metrics for a 10 day period? Nope… lets punish those sellers so they lose their tiny discounts.
Shameful, and i expect this tiem to be no better.

Deliveries late by at least 10 days, we have had communication from Royal Mail confirming that they had been prioritising Special Deliveries over the rest of the post.

Also, Toby’s comments about what his Postman said seems to make sense as we had shipments that were sent more recently that have been delivered while we still have packages undelivered from the 5th March!

Does anyone know what Amazon’s take is on these problems with Royal Mail?

If it snows and the post gets delayed by two days , that means they have three days post to deliver on days three

Assuming RM work at 80 % efficiancy , that leaves 20% extra they can do in any one day – even with overtime this is a limited amount and the sacks that were ALREADY in the depot are now buried under the subsequent 3 days post that has arrived since

So the post awaiting delivery on day one ,MAY not be uncovered till day 7 . THATS what they dont understand , that the sensible thing to do is FIFO (FIRST IN , FIRST OUT) What actually happens is LIFO and thats REAL life , not the fantasy ebay believes in

rich

1 year ago

Ebay dont even understand there own metric. The metric is designed to improve seller dispatch times. So we can prove with Certificates of postings that we still dispatched within 24 hours – CSR response “no good has to be fully tracked so we can check on line!”

northumbrian

1 year ago

no auto deletion here of defects we had to badger them
and now this even though we have been registered for vat on ebay since day one
and its shown on all listings

What you need to do
As soon as possible, please take the following three steps to make sure that you’re meeting your UK VAT obligations:
1
Check if you need to register with HMRC, visit HMRC’s website.
2
If you have registered with HMRC, provide your UK VAT number to eBay. Doing so enables us to automatically add your UK VAT number to all your listings that require it.
3
Check that any UK VAT number you have already provided remains valid and that the company or trading name which you have provided to eBay matches that on your original VAT registration document. You can do this in your Business Seller Information which can be found in Account Settings / Site Preferences / Business Seller Preferences.
If you don’t complete these steps within 30 days, we may be obliged to stop you from listing new items on ebay​.co​.uk and eventually fully restrict you from selling on eBay, as well as removing any of your existing listings.

Paul

1 year ago

we seen the same thing on the announcements board a while ago wher the link takes you to a totally different vat number page to the one in your seller preferences,i rang concierge even though they already have our vat number and they said dont enter it again as they already have it.and dont worry about it!lol. theres just no need to said you ‘northumbrian’ such a message that comes across threatening from ebay especially when your a long term loyal and genuine ebay member!its shocking really

Paul

1 year ago

northumbrian-we seen the same thing on the announcements board a while ago wher the link takes you to a totally different vat number page to the one in your seller preferences,i rang concierge even though they already have our vat number and they said dont enter it again as they already have it.and dont worry about it!lol. theres just no need to said you ‘northumbrian’ such a message that comes across threatening from ebay especially when your a long term loyal and genuine ebay member!its shocking really

northumbrian

1 year ago

we know from experience not to ignore anything of this nature from ebay it gets up and bites your arse if you do
and concierge are very good but even they have to contend with the ebay lunatics that govern how rules and conditions are applied

paul

1 year ago

Do you have any advice Northumbrian?as were in same predicament,they already have our vat number and it always shows in listings,but not sure whether to add it again?did u get that message in your inbox or the one from the announcement board?cheers paul

alan paterson

1 year ago

I have been assured by ebay that defects will be removed automatically. This applies to defects between 28th Feb and 4th March. If they have not already been removed I am assured they will be. Please be aware that it takes time for defects to come off the seller dash board.

In addition to this we experienced backlogs at the Mail Centre days after the snow had actually cleared.

I chased up my RM account manager today and got a letter confirming the backlogs at the mail centre. Royal Mail clear backlogs by working on the newest mail first then working BACK the way (if you think about it statistically this makes sense but it means that delayed parcels can be VERY delayed). I intend to show this letter to ebay and i am confident that it will cover us for any late delivery defects with 2d barcodes.

In addition to the backlogs some sellers may find that their 2d barcodes were not working. Sigh. The last few weeks have been a bit of a problem for late deliveries. I am confident that we will be covered by ebay.

I have always found ebay to be very fair with defect removal when it can be substantiated.

paul

1 year ago

northumbrian-Do you have any advice on this situaton?as were in same predicament,they already have our vat number and it always shows in listings,but not sure whether to add it again?did u get that message in your inbox or the one from the announcement board?cheers paul

northumbrian

1 year ago

we received the message direct to inbox-after our first irritation
we went thru the message point by point,
filled in the business details page on ebay exactly as shown on the vat registration cert,
then discovered we did not have our trading name entered exactly as shown on the form ,
were assuming this may be the cause of the message
though no details or hints were given by ebay

northumbrian

1 year ago

or should we say there were multiple hints and instructions in the message but no specific detail referring to our problem

Paul

1 year ago

thanks for that northumbrian,appreciate that.youd think a phone call or a nicer heads up to yourself would have been more helpful!lol. that must have been what flagged it up,glad you sorted it anyway,thanks again paul

paul

1 year ago

was it just a daft spelling mistake i take it?im just curious as i have ‘ltd’ on end of company name but has ‘limited’ on certficate,i know im being petty and everyone knows its the abbreviation for that word,but wanted to check as ebay concierge just dont seem to know the answer!

northumbrian

1 year ago

we think it was we missed out the limited
and the company reg no
but we will only know that if and when the restriction comes

as for concierge we think the service is now so diluted and overworked
, then with anchor shop additions it will be
little better than the normal service for plebs lol

paul

1 year ago

think il wait to see if we get a message first,ive just checked a load of companies who dont have the word limited at all or are just using the abbreviation inc argos etc,so it would be daft of them to start banning people for that!did you check out that new link on the announcements board?

Paul

1 year ago

has anyone else come across the msg northumbrian received?

james

1 year ago

Yup, emailed and in ebay messages.
We have a VAT number displayed and have done for years.
Not that ebay could possibly know that before sending out aggressive emails.

We already have the VAT number showing but it was easy enough to enter again, whatever the reason may be.

paul

1 year ago

james-thanks for the heads up,and was there any discrepancies in your info?have you changed anything since the msg?or do you reckon there just sending this out to everyone to put the frighteners up the non vat payers?just seems harsh sending messages like that to us genuine sellers who have already gave our vat info
cheers paul

james

1 year ago

@ Paul,
we’ve been VAT registered with ebay as long as i’ve been here, when they were charging fees sans VAT, they were happy that our VAT details were in order.
our VAT number shows on every ebay listing.
when i click the link in the message to provide the VAT number, the box was blank.
didn’t ask to provide any more details than that on the page.

Jay

1 year ago

eBay is an absolute shambles so up until yesterday we were going to be top rated wake up this morning and they have decided to add another 14 defects from the beginning of the month

Why were these not done for the last three weeks

Seems like some underhand tactic surely cannot be coincidence that you update after ten days on the day of the evaluation! There is no recompense half of them are not even valid and some are for the bad weather which were supposedly removed but have not been

Surely someone somewhere will have the power to step in work 16 hours a day and can’t be top rated then it’s a cheat! Rang eBay they saying we removed the defects but wait until the next evaluation!